Azure File Sync by David Papkin

Azure File Sync replicates files from your on-premises Windows Server to an Azure file share. With Azure File Sync, you don’t have to choose between the benefits of cloud and the benefits of your on-premises file server – you can have both! Azure File Sync enables you to centralize your file services in Azure while maintaining local access to your data.

We created Microsoft Azure Files with the goal of making it easy for you to reap the benefits of cloud storage. We know from decades of experience building Windows file server that file shares are useful for more than just application development; file shares are used for everything under the sun. With Azure Files, we are focused on building general purpose file shares that can replace all the file servers and NAS devices your organization has, and today, we are happy to share an important milestone on that journey: the general availability of Azure File Sync!

Azure File Sync grew out of our conversations with thousands of customers about the challenge of balancing the need for local and fast access to their frequently accessed data with the maintenance and time cost of managing on-premises storage. Azure File Sync replicates files from your on-premises Windows Server to an Azure file share, just like how you might have used DFS-R to replicate data between Windows Servers. Once you have a copy of your data in Azure, you can enable cloud tiering—the real magic of Azure File Sync—to store only the hottest and most recently accessed data on-premises. And since the cloud has a full copy of your data, you can connect as many servers to your Azure file share as you want, allowing you to establish quick caches of your data wherever your users happen to be. As mentioned above, in simple terms, Azure File Sync enables you to centralize your file services in Azure while maintaining local access to your data.

Having a copy of the data in the cloud enables you to do more. For example, you can nearly instantly recover from the loss of server with our fast disaster recovery feature. No matter what happens to your local server – a bad update, damaged physical disks, or something worse, you can rest easy knowing the cloud has a fully resilient copy of your data. Simply connect your new Windows Server to your existing sync group, and your namespace will be pulled down right away for use.